Eurobloat #0122 • June 2020
June 2020 was the month the European Commission discovered that the most dangerous threat to the rule of law in Europe was a German court reading the German constitution. The cure, naturally, was more Europe.
Folly of the Month: The Commission threatens to sue Germany for obeying its own constitution
Through June the Commission kept up its threat to open infringement proceedings against Germany, because Germany's highest court had dared to ask, in its ruling of 5 May, whether the European Central Bank was buying bonds within its legal powers. Karlsruhe had committed the unpardonable sin of suggesting that an EU institution should be able to explain itself, and that an EU court's blessing was not automatically the final word in every member state. The Commission President had already pronounced that the final word on EU law is "always spoken in Luxembourg, nowhere else", and held the option of dragging Berlin to court over its open head. So the body that lectures Poland and Hungary about judicial independence menaced the most respected constitutional court on the continent for being independent. The lesson for the smaller capitals was clear enough: national courts exist to rubber-stamp, not to read.
1. Two antitrust probes into one telephone in a single day
On 16 June the Commission opened not one but two formal investigations into Apple on the same day, one over App Store rules and a second over Apple Pay and the NFC chip. Brussels could not deliver a vaccine, a budget or a border, but it could find the time to police how an American company arranges the icons on a glass rectangle.
2. The hunt for an EU tax begins
Having proposed to borrow 750 billion euros in the EU's name, the Commission spent June touting the new taxes to repay it: a plastic levy, a digital levy, a carbon border charge and a financial transaction tax. The point was never the climate or the recycling. The point was an EU "own resource", money flowing to Brussels without member states having to vote on it each year.
3. The Digital Services Act consultation opens
On 2 June the Commission launched its consultation for the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, the future rulebook for "gatekeeper" platforms. The questionnaire was the polite opening move before years of fines and obligations aimed squarely at companies that European founders conspicuously failed to build.
→ digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
4. Brussels leans on the platforms to police your reading
On 10 June the Commission and the foreign-policy chief issued a joint paper on coronavirus disinformation, naming China and Russia and demanding that Facebook and Twitter label content and file monthly reports. The state deciding which facts are correct, and outsourcing the enforcement to Silicon Valley, is not a defence of democracy. It is the machinery for managing it.
5. The EU goes shopping for a wage-setting power it does not have
On 3 June the Commission opened its second-stage consultation on EU minimum wages, edging towards a directive on a matter that the treaties leave firmly to member states and their own social partners. Even the employers' organisations pointed out that wages are set in national capitals, not in Brussels. The Commission pressed on regardless.
6. The Court strikes down a transparency law for being too transparent
On 18 June the Court of Justice ruled Hungary's law on foreign-funded NGOs unlawful, because requiring groups bankrolled from abroad to declare it offended the free movement of capital. A bloc obsessed with foreign interference in its own elections decided that knowing who pays for your civil society is a violation of rights, so long as the country asking the question is Hungary.
7. The ECB prints another 600 billion
On 4 June the European Central Bank enlarged its pandemic bond-buying programme by 600 billion euros, to a tidy 1.35 trillion. This was the very programme a German court had just questioned as possibly beyond the bank's mandate, so the bank's reply was to make it almost twice as large.
8. A new weapon against foreign subsidies, conveniently aimed outward
On 17 June the Commission unveiled a White Paper on foreign subsidies, proposing tools to screen and block subsidised non-EU firms in the single market. The EU, whose own state-aid floodgates had just been thrown open for the pandemic, decided the real distortion of competition was always somebody else's.
9. Parliament demands a two-year talking shop and possibly new treaties
On 18 June the Parliament voted to push for the Conference on the Future of Europe, a two-year exercise in citizen "participation" with an express eye on rewriting the EU treaties. A continent locked down and unemployed was offered, as its priority, a federalist seminar about how to acquire still more power.
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